Re: Speculators causing immense price swings: go fuck yourselves
do you mean my decision of wanting to sleep, 3am in the morning, instead of waiting for 6 confirmations, was a bad decision?
i think you dint understand my point of view, if the money was your first priority then yes you did made a bad decision if sleeping was your first priority then you dint make a mistake Those who argue that there would have not been a rally to begin with (i.e. without leveraging) are kidding themselves.
Here's my stance on the leverage debate.
Momentum is the biggest part of any price movement. You can see this very clearly in the charts... the big trends last for months. If we had not had leverage, we would have had a slower rise (and perhaps even from a lower bottom), but the price would have kept rising instead of running into a brick wall. We definitely could have gotten past $7 without Bitcoinica.
I've said it before, but with Bitcoin if you're smart enough it's relatively easy to "beat the market."
This isn't the stock market. There's countless fewer variables to consider and as such it's infinitely easier to isolate market variables. This also means that the variables you can isolate have a much more deterministic impact on the market. Deconstructing the Bitcoin market compared to the stock market is like someone asking you to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar vs. the number of jellybeans in a swimming pool just by glancing at them.
The ONLY time I've gotten somewhat fucked was a few weeks ago when everything snowballed on Bitcoinica. Why did I get fucked? I wasn't even aware that the asterisk could be an issue. Well, it's turned out to be a huge issue. The downward movement today was completely expected and that's why I didn't lose anything. But seriously, Bitcoinica's gotta figure out its reserve issues.
The Bitcoin market is a system. All systems need homeostasis to stabilize, and that means balancing systemic input and output. Bitcoinica really fucks with the input and output.
I think the problem is mtgox's orderbooks are very thin. at this moment, any speculator can go in bitcoinica with 1000btc, shortsell with 1:10 leverage, and cause the price to go to low 4.xx. The orderbooks just need to muscle up and be able to handle dumps of a couple thousand coins.
Remember this guy: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=59969.0 ? see how fucktard speculators (and this was a true fucktard, from head to toes) can fuck many people over in seconds. Hell, even if I was waiting for the confirmations during that moment, Id still get fucked in that scenario.
One last thing, if it wasn't for the speculators how long do you think you would have to wait around for someone to buy your bitcoins?
as long time as it takes for someone who needs bitcoins to buy my ask. A day? but no, civilized behavior is not accepted in btc trading 